mick laBriola

Walter Davis Jr. (September 2, 1932 – June 2, 1990) was an American hard bop pianist. An often remarkable and inventive bebop and hard bop pianist, Walter Davis Jr. once left the music world to be a tailor, but returned. A solid soloist, bandleader, and accompanist, he amassed a good body of work while never becoming a high-profile name even within the jazz community. Davis played with Babs Gonzales’ Three Bips & a Bop as a teen, then moved from Richmond to New York in the early ’50s. He played with Max Roach and Charlie Parker, recording with Roach in 1953. He joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band in 1956, and toured the Middle East and South America. He also played in Paris with Donald Byrd in 1958 and with Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers in 1959. After retiring from music for a while to run his tailor shop, Davis returned in the ’60s, producing records and writing arrangements for a local New Jersey group. He studied music in India in 1969, and played with Sonny Rollins in the early ’70s. Davis had another stint with the Jazz Messengers in 1975, then led his own group in New York. Davis recorded for Blue Note, Mapleshade, Debut, Denon, and Red and for various French labels. He did sessions with Roach, Rollins, Sonny Criss, Jackie McLean, Pierre Michelot, Archie Shepp, Kenny Clarke, Byrd, and Blakey, among others.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Davis performed as a teenager with Babs Gonzales. In the 1950s, Davis recorded with Melba Liston, Max Roach and played with Roach, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1958 he played with trumpeter Donald Byrd at Le Chat Qui Pêche in Paris and shortly after realized his dream of becoming pianist and composer-arranger for Art Blakey‘s Jazz Messengers.

Clifford Laconia Jordan (September 2, 1931 – March 27, 1993) was an American jazz tenor saxophone player. While in Chicago, he performed with Max Roach, Sonny Stitt, and some rhythm and blues groups. He moved to New York City in 1957, after which he recorded three albums for Blue Note. He recorded with Horace Silver, J.J. Johnson, and Kenny Dorham, among others. He was part of the Charles Mingus Sextet, with Eric Dolphy, during its 1964 European tour.

Jordan toured Africa with Randy Weston, and performed in Paris while living in Belgium. In later years, he led his own groups, performed with Cedar Walton‘s quartet Eastern Rebellion, and led a big band.

Jordan was married to Shirley Jordan, a designer and former owner of Clothing Manufacturing Corporation in New York. He later married Sandy Jordan (née Williams), a graphic artist and Honorary Founders Board member of the Jazz Foundation of America.

Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver  (September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s.

After playing tenor saxophone and piano at school in Connecticut, Silver got his break on piano when his trio was recruited by Stan Getz in 1950. Silver soon moved to New York City, where he developed a reputation as a composer and for his bluesy playing. Frequent sideman recordings in the mid-1950s helped further, but it was his work with the Jazz Messengers, co-led by Art Blakey, that brought both his writing and playing most attention. Their Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers album contained Silver’s first hit, “The Preacher“. After leaving Blakey in 1956, Silver formed his own quintet, with what became the standard small group line-up of tenor saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and drums. Their public performances and frequent recordings for Blue Note Records increased Silver’s popularity, even through changes of personnel. His most successful album was Song for My Father, made with two iterations of the quintet in 1963 and 1964.

Several changes occurred in the early 1970s: Silver disbanded his group to spend more time with his wife and to concentrate on composing; he included lyrics in his recordings; and his interest in spiritualism developed. The last two of these were often combined, resulting in commercially unsuccessful releases such as The United States of Mind series. Silver left Blue Note after 28 years, founded his own record label, and scaled back his touring in the 1980s, relying in part on royalties from his compositions for income. In 1993, he returned to major record labels, releasing five albums before gradually withdrawing from public view because of health problems.

As a player, Silver transitioned from bebop to hard bop by stressing melody rather than complex harmony, and combined clean and often humorous right-hand lines with darker notes and chords in a near-perpetual left-hand rumble. His compositions similarly emphasized catchy melodies, but often also contained dissonant harmonies. Many of his varied repertoire of songs, including “Doodlin’“, “Peace“, and “Sister Sadie“, became jazz standardsthat are still widely played. His considerable legacy encompasses his influence on other pianists and composers, and the development of young jazz talents who appeared in his bands over the course of four decades.

Silver was born on September 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Connecticut. His mother, Gertrude, was from Connecticut; his father, John Tavares Silver, was born on the island of Maio, Cape Verde, and emigrated to the United States as a young man. She was a maid and sang in a church choir; he worked for a tire company. Horace had a much older half-brother, Eugene Fletcher, from his mother’s first marriage, and was the third child for his parents, after John, who lived to 6 months, and Maria, who was stillborn.

Silver began playing the piano in his childhood and had classical music lessons. His father taught him the folk music of Cape Verde. At the age of 11 Silver became interested in becoming a musician, after hearing the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra. His early piano influences included the styles of boogie-woogie and the blues, the pianists Nat King Cole, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, and Teddy Wilson, as well as some jazz horn players.

Lawrence (Booker T.) Laury (September 2, 1914 – September 23, 1995) was an American boogie-woogie, blues, gospel and jazz pianist and singer. Laury worked with Memphis Slim and Mose Vinson but did not record his debut album until he was in his late sixties. He appeared in two films; Great Balls of Fire!, the biopic about Jerry Lee Lewis’ early career, and the documentary Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, in which musicologist, writer and blues producer Robert Palmer, along with Dave Stewart from the band Eurythmics, interview and play with blues musicians from Memphis, Tennessee and the North Hill Country area of Mississippi.

Laury was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up with his lifelong friend Memphis Slim. At the age of six, after helping his mother play the family’s pump organ, Laury learned to play the keyboards. His barrelhouse playing style, which he developed alongside Slim, was based on the influence of the Memphis performers Roosevelt Sykes, Sunnyland Slim, and Speckled Red. In the early 1930s, and in the company of the younger Mose Vinson, Slim and Laury began playing in local clubs.

NGC 3981 is a spiral galaxy located 62 million light-years away in the constellation of Crater. It was discovered on February 7, 1785 by William Herschel. NGC 3981 is a member of the NGC 4038 Group which is part of the Virgo Supercluster.

Archie Lee Bell (born September 1, 1944) is an American solo singer and former lead singer of Archie Bell & the Drells.

Born to African-American parents Langston and Ruthie Bell in Henderson, Texas, United States, Archie is the second oldest of seven brothers, and the brother of USC and NFL football player Ricky Bell, and former world karate champion and singer, Jerry Bell. He also is related to the record producer, Thom Bell. Bell was singing in Houston night clubs at age ten, and credits seeing the performances of Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke as influencing him to become a singer. He formed the Drells in 1956 while in junior high school.

He became known around the world for the hit that he had with the Drells, “Tighten Up“. He has pursued a solo career since the breakup of the Drells in 1980. Bell later released one solo album (I Never Had It So Good – 1981) on Beckett Records and continued to perform with The Drells off and on for the next twenty years. During the 1990s the line-up also included Steve “Stevie G.” Guettler (guitar, vocals), Jeff “JT” Strickler (bass guitar, vocals), Steve Farrell (guitar, vocals), Mike Wilson (keyboards, vocals) and Wes Armstrong (drums, vocals) of the Atlanta-based group The Rockerz.

Gene Harris (born Eugene Haire, September 1, 1933 – January 16, 2000) was an American jazz pianist known for his warm sound and blues and gospel infused style that is known as soul jazz.

From 1956 to 1970, he played in The Three Sounds trio with bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Bill Dowdy. During this time, The Three Sounds recorded regularly for Blue Note and Verve.

He mostly retired to Boise, starting in the late 1970s, although he performed regularly at the Idanha Hotel there. Ray Brown convinced him to go back on tour in the early 1980s. He played with the Ray Brown Trio and then led his own groups, recording mostly on Concord Records, until his death from kidney failure in 2000. Gene Harris is survived by his 3 daughters, Tracy Haire, Beth Haire- Lewis and Gina Haire (Niki Haris), and a son Eugene Haire. One of his most popular numbers was his “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a live version of which is on his Live at Otter Crest album, published by Concord.

Willie Ruff (born September 1, 1931) is an American jazz musician, specializing in the French horn and double bass, and a music scholar and educator, primarily as a Yale professor from 1971 to 2017.

He was born in Sheffield, Alabama. Ruff attended the Yale School of Music as an undergraduate (Bachelor of Music, 1953) and graduate student (Master of Music, 1954). Ruff played in the Mitchell-Ruff Duo with pianist Dwike Mitchell for over 50 years. Mitchell and Ruff first met in 1947, when they were teenaged servicemen stationed at the former Lockbourne Air Force Base in Ohio; Mitchell recruited Ruff to play bass with his unit band for an Air Force radio program. Mitchell and Ruff later played in Lionel Hampton‘s band but left in 1955 to form their own group. Together as the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, they played as “second act” to artists such as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie. From 1955 to 2011, the duo regularly performed and lectured in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The Mitchell-Ruff Duo was the first jazz band to play in the Soviet Union (1959) and in China (1981). Mitchell died in 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojzxeFofNTQ

Arthur Edward Pepper Jr. (September 1, 1925 – June 15, 1982)was an American alto saxophonist and very occasional tenor saxophonist and clarinetist. A longtime figure in West Coast jazz, Pepper came to prominence in Stan Kenton‘s big band. He was known for his emotionally charged performances and several stylistic shifts throughout his career, and was described by critic Scott Yanow as “the world’s great altoist” at the time of his death.

Art Pepper was born in Gardena, California, on September 1, 1925. His mother was a 14-year-old runaway; his father, a merchant seaman. Both were violent alcoholics, and when Art was still quite young he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother. He expressed early musical interest and talent, and he was given lessons. He began playing clarinet at nine, switched to alto saxophone at 13 and immediately began jamming on Central Avenue, the black nightclub district of Los Angeles.

At the age of 17 he began playing professionally with Benny Carter and then became part of the Stan Kenton orchestra, touring with that band until he was drafted in 1943. After the war he returned to Los Angeles and joined the Kenton Innovations Orchestra. By the 1950s Pepper was recognized as one of the leading alto saxophonists in jazz, finishing second only to Charlie Parker as Best Alto Saxophonist in the DownBeat magazine Readers Poll of 1952. Along with Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and Shelly Manne, and perhaps due more to geography than playing style, Pepper is often associated with the musical movement known as West Coast jazz, as contrasted with the East Coast (or “hot”) jazz of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Some of Pepper’s most famous albums from the 1950s are Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, Art Pepper + Eleven – Modern Jazz Classics, Gettin’ Together, and Smack Up. Representative music from this time appears on The Aladdin Recordings (three volumes), The Early Show, The Late Show, The Complete Surf Ride, and The Way It Was!, which features a session recorded with Warne Marsh.

Westerhout 43, also known as W43, is a region of star formation of our galaxy located in the constellation of Aquila at a distance of 6 kilo-parsecs(nearly 20,000 light-years) of the Sun, that is considered the region of the Milky Way that is most actively forming stars. Despite this, however, it is so heavily obscured by the interstellar dust that it is totally invisible in the optical and must be studied using other wavelengths that are not affected by it, such as the infrared or the radio waves.

This star-forming region is located in the 5-kpc ring, a ring with that radius that encircles the central bar of our galaxy and that contains most of its molecular hydrogen as well as most of its star formation.

It is associated with a very massive complex of molecular clouds with a total mass of more than 7 million times the one of our Sun and is forming stars of all masses within star clusters that are less massive versions of those found on starburst galaxies; it still has capacity to form more clusters.

There are also massive protostars as well as stellar clusters in formation embedded within the nebula, with this star formation region likened to NGC 3603.

Sir George Ivan Morrison OBE (born 31 August 1945) is a Northern Irish singer-songwriter, instrumentalist and record producer. His professional career began as a teenager in the late 1950s, playing a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish showbands, covering the popular hits of that time. Van Morrison rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as the lead singer of the Northern Irish R&B and rock band, Them, with whom he recorded the garage band classic “Gloria“. His solo career began in 1967, under the pop-hit orientated guidance of Bert Berns with the release of the hit single “Brown Eyed Girl“. After Berns’s death, Warner Bros. Records bought out his contract and allowed him three sessions to record Astral Weeks (1968). Though this album gradually garnered high praise, it was initially a poor seller.

Morrison has a reputation for being at once stubborn, idiosyncratic, and sublime. His live performances at their best are seen as transcendental and inspired, while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums Astral Weeks and Moondance, and the live album It’s Too Late to Stop Now, are highly acclaimed.

Moondance (1970) established Morrison as a major artist, and he built on his reputation throughout the 1970s with a series of acclaimed albums and live performances. He continues to record and tour, producing albums and live performances that sell well and are generally warmly received, sometimes collaborating with other artists, such as Georgie Fame and The Chieftains.

Much of Morrison’s music is structured around the conventions of soul music and R&B, such as the popular singles “Brown Eyed Girl“, “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile)“, “Domino” and “Wild Night“. An equal part of his catalogue consists of lengthy, loosely connected, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition, jazz and stream-of-consciousness narrative, such as the album Astral Weeks and the lesser known Veedon Fleece and Common One. The two strains together are sometimes referred to as “Celtic soul”. He has received two Grammy Awards, the 1994 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, the 2017 Americana Music Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2016, he was knighted for services to the music industry and to tourism in Northern Ireland. He is known by the nickname Van the Man to his fans.

Wilton Lewis Felder (August 31, 1940 – September 27, 2015) was an American saxophone and bass player, and is best known as a founding member of the Jazz Crusaders, later known as The Crusaders.

Felder was born in Houston, Texas and studied music at Texas Southern University. Felder, Wayne Henderson, Joe Sample, and Stix Hooperfounded their group while in high school in Houston. The Jazz Crusaders evolved from a straight-ahead jazz combo into a pioneering jazz-rock fusion group, with a definite soul music influence. Felder worked with the original group for over thirty years, and continued to work in its later versions, which often featured other founding members.

Felder also worked as a West Coast studio musician, mostly playing electric bass, for various soul and R&B musicians, and was one of the in-house bass players for Motown Records, when the record label opened operations in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. He played on recordings by the Jackson 5 such as “I Want You Back” and “The Love You Save“, as well as for Marvin Gaye and Grant Green. He also played bass for soft rock groups like Seals and Crofts. Also of note were his contributions to the John Cale album Paris 1919, Steely Dan‘s Pretzel Logic (1974), and Billy Joel‘s Piano Man and Streetlife Serenade albums. He was one of three bass players on Randy Newman‘s Sail Away (1972) and Joan Baez‘ Diamonds & Rust. Felder also anchored albums from Joni Mitchell and Michael Franks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgOogZqq0NA

Paul Winter (born August 31, 1939) is an American saxophonist, composer and bandleader. A seven-time Grammy Award-winner, he is recognized as one of the pioneers of the world music genre, and also for his genre of “earth music,” which interweaves the voices of the greater symphony of the wild with instrumental voices from classical, jazz and world music traditions. The music is often improvised, and recorded in natural acoustic spaces, to reflect the qualities and instincts brought into play by the environment. With his various ensembles—the Paul Winter Sextet, the Paul Winter Consort, and the Earth Band—he has recorded more than 40 albums, and performed in 52 countries and six continents.

Herman Riley (August 31, 1933 – April 14, 2007) was a jazz saxophonist who spent most of his life as a studio musician in Los Angeles. He worked with Gene Ammons, Lorez Alexandria, Count Basie, Bobby Bryant, Donald Byrd, Benny Carter, Quincy Jones, Shelly Manne, Blue Mitchell, and Joe Williams.